Greece scales back proposed border fence with Turkey (Roundup)

Jan 3, 2011, 12:59 GMT

Athens/Brussels - Stung by criticism, the Greek government on Monday was backing away from a plan to build a fence along its border with Turkey in a bid to keep out illegal immigrants, according to government sources.

New plans released Monday by the Citizen Protection Ministry indicated plans now called for a 12.5-kilometre-long and three-metre- high fence along a weak entry point on the border, near the Evros river and town of Orestiada.

Plans mooted over the weekend had called for a 206-kilometre-long fence.

Media still criticized the new plan, calling it window dressing.

Officials had said Saturday the 206-kilometre-long fence would be like the one erected by the United States along its frontier with Mexico.

In Brussels, officials from the European Commission, the EU's executive, said they would not comment on media reports, and that border management is largely, in principle, the preserve of the member state concerned.

But commission home-affairs spokesman Michele Cercone stressed that the commission wanted to see Greece launch a major overhaul of its creaking asylum system, rather than building walls.

'Fences and walls have, in the past, proven to be really short-term measures that don't help to address and manage migratory challenges in a more consolidated and structural way,' he said.

Greece, which has already received millions of euros in EU funding to improve its border and asylum systems, 'needs sound and long-term structural reforms and measures in order to better manage its border, address the challenges linked to migration flows and create a sound and efficient asylum system,' he said.

In the six months up through the end of November, 33,000 illegal immigrants were detected crossing the Greek-Turkish land border. Most were from Afghanistan, Algeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Iraq. Since November, European Union teams have been patrolling the border with Greek police.

It is the first time that an EU Rapid Border Intervention Team (RaBIT) has been deployed to an EU member state by the bloc's frontier agency, Frontex, since the teams were created in 2007.

Officials said over the weekend that, in 2010, an average of '200 refugees each day' had crossed into Greece from Turkey.

Around 80 per of the illegal immigrants in the EU arrive via Greece. Large numbers then seek to reach Italy via ferry.

There are currently an estimated 300,000 people living illegally in Greece.

Illegal immigrants nabbed by border police are placed in detention camps, which are bursting at the seams. Human rights groups have criticized Greece's asylum policy and conditions in the camps.

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